I know we didn't win BOS in the HBT comp but I figured why not share this tasty recipe! We did enter it as 23 - but I feel placing it in the Porter section is more fitting.

This beer is extremely layered, when had young, the dried fruit/raisin from the Special B is prominent. Over time, the B blends very well and you are left with a nice roasty, coffee flavor that ends with dried fruit. Don't fear the ~100 IBUs, they are needed to support this malt bill.

Notes
We turned this around rather quickly for such a big beer. Bottled at 8 weeks. For the sake of comparison, the competition entries were aged ~6 months. Personal opinion is this peaked around month 5.

Thought I'd let you know that I used your recipe as the base for a partial mash version. Turned out to be quite a bit lower gravity, so I imagine that the hops are going to be more prominent. But the wort smells fantastic (just tucked the primary away in the closet last night) and I'm looking forward to seeing if I did "justice" to the recipe sometime in February.

I mashed the grain at a target of 150*F for 75 min (4.6 quarts H20)
Sparged with 7qts. H20

After the boil, I was able to cool the wort down to 70* in ten minutes using my proleptic Christmas gift, a new copper immersion wort chiller. So cool! So much better than stirring ice cubes around the bath tub!

This is my first go at a partial mash, so I'm learning quite a bit as I go. If I make this recipe again, I'd probably either add another 3.3 lbs of amber LME or a couple pounds of the pale malt to raise the original gravity up closer to the first recipe. Other than that, I'm quite happy with how this has turned out.

I wish I could lend a hand with your OG being lower but we've never done partial mashes so I'm not too familiar with the conversions. etc.

Would love to know how it turns out though, this is one of our hallmark brews

Quote:

Originally Posted by ericdaryl

Thought I'd let you know that I used your recipe as the base for a partial mash version. Turned out to be quite a bit lower gravity, so I imagine that the hops are going to be more prominent. But the wort smells fantastic (just tucked the primary away in the closet last night) and I'm looking forward to seeing if I did "justice" to the recipe sometime in February.

I mashed the grain at a target of 150*F for 75 min (4.6 quarts H20)
Sparged with 7qts. H20

After the boil, I was able to cool the wort down to 70* in ten minutes using my proleptic Christmas gift, a new copper immersion wort chiller. So cool! So much better than stirring ice cubes around the bath tub!

This is my first go at a partial mash, so I'm learning quite a bit as I go. If I make this recipe again, I'd probably either add another 3.3 lbs of amber LME or a couple pounds of the pale malt to raise the original gravity up closer to the first recipe. Other than that, I'm quite happy with how this has turned out.

I'll definitely let you know how it turns out once I get the chance to crack open a bottle.

Not having much experience with partial mash either, I'm not sure if the lower OG is a result of something that I botched, or if it's about right for the amount of grain/LME that I used. I imagine that some of that recipe software would be able to answer that question for me, but I haven't gotten in that deep just yet.

It's in the chill phase right now. Our LHBS let us down a little - they were out of Special B, so they recommended Caramunich as the best substitute out of what they had. They were also out of Amarillos, so we're using Cascades (@6.3% AA) instead.

We used nearly 9 gallons to mash - our BIAB has a lot of deadspace, and that's the only way we could get all the malt submerged. We could only use maybe a half gallon sparge to get to 8 gallons pre-boil.